I do yoga "so I'm not an arsehole", says yoga trainer to the stars Cameron Shayne.

"Aren't we all trying to be less of an arsehole?" It's a fair point from the renowned teacher and martial artist, famous for training Sugar Ray Leonard, Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox among others, albeit not the sort of floaty phrase you would expect from the peace, love and mung beans yogic crew.

Shayne is among a new breed of teachers and practitioners who are keen to demystify the stereotypes of yoga and make this ancient practice palatable to modern audiences. And he is using an unusual platform to do it.

The Wanderlust Festival that has just hit our shores, after starting in the United States five years ago, fuses food, music, yoga and beer.

The festival begins with a mass meditation and ends with live music. Alongside the kombucha stand sits a "beer and beef" outlet. There is a wine-tasting tent, a "thankful tree" where people write and attach baubles of gratitude, a group hula-hooping on a hill, deep bass throbbing from the DJ and a sea of bottoms raised skyward in the downward-dog posture.

The crowd is flying high, but not in the artificially induced way of your average festival. Here it's more likely to be the result of raw cacao or an animated Aum. That said, it's not your average, navel-gazing yoga festival either.

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"We're so much more than a yoga festival," say organisers Jonnie and Jacque Halstead. "We're a mindful living, green living and music festival . . . You don't have to be this spiritual yogi in the mountains to come."

As for the unlikely mix of beer and yoga, Shayne challenges assumptions about what yoga is or has to be.

"Is it a posture? Is it an outfit? Is it a mantra? Is it a bunch of words strung together in a certain way? I'm sorry, but if that is yoga to one individual, I do not share that definition."

For him it is more about cultivating mindfulness and authenticity than dogma and austerity.

The practice of yoga is simply "integrating a more conscious way of living, a more sensitive way of living into their daily lives", he says.

Cultivating these qualities doesn't necessarily mean denying life's pleasures, agrees celebri-yoga teacher and author of Modern Yoga Duncan Peak, who says that such a festival helps to make it accessible instead of alienating.

"It's an evolution of the contemporary yoga scene, bringing a mainstream focus that makes it accessible to lots of different people and brings that festival, fun atmosphere.

"A lot of people criticise it, but you can refine what people learn and it's going to be a doorway to more traditional practice so I think it's an awesome step forward."

Such novel approaches to yoga appear to be working.

Since Australia's first yoga studio opened in 1950, the practice has grown at a steady rate and, in the past 15 years, moved into the mainstream.

Now it is nearly a billion-dollar industry and yoga makes the top 15 of our most popular sports and physical activities.

Peak, a former professional football player and elite paratrooper, attributes this in part to the break from rigid traditions and the participation of sports stars who have helped to bust the stereotype that yoga is only practised by hippie girls and girly guys.

Through this liberated lens yoga and beer sit peacefully together and such a festival can succeed, something Peak doubts was possible in Australia even five years ago.

Peak says people who adopt a modern approach to yoga are simply "devoting a portion of their week to becoming more self-aware and through that awareness developing more intimacy in their lives, whether it's with themselves, their friends, family or partners".

A little more of this is sure to lessen the arsehole in all of us and, it turns out, we can do it and still have a beer at the end of the day. Yaum.